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In his first volume of Star Trek episode adaptations, James Blish supplies a backstory that is vastly different to that of the "identical Earth" premise depicted in the television episode. Blish wrote that Miri's planet is the fourth planet orbiting the star 70 Ophiucus, and is a beautiful Earth-like planet having one large and two smaller continents connected by islands. Ophiucus IV (or Ophiucus 4 – Blish never names the planet) is located between twelve and fifteen light years from Earth and had been the first planet outside Earth’s solar system to be colonized, in this case by refugees from the so-called "Cold Peace" in the early 2100s, about 500 years before the events depicted in the television episode. These colonists were isolationists who violently repulsed the first attempt to contact them by a later expedition from Earth, and so no further contact was attempted. As it turned out, the Ophiucus system was in a "backwater" part of the galaxy that subsequent years of Earth-based space exploration passed by, and so the belligerent colony was easily ignored and almost forgotten. Around 300 years before the events shown in Miri, scientists on Ophiucus IV developed the experimental life-prolongation project that resulted in the deaths of every adult on the planet. Yet despite their close proximity, the distress signal sent by the colony didn’t reach Earth because Ophiucus IV stood between Earth and the center of the Milky Way, whose radiation created interstellar static that drowned out the SOS signal the colony had directed towards Earth.
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